Whether this bothers you or not - and according to a recent survey 73 percent of you think broadband is 'as essential as water' - fear of digital exclusion is something that exercises government and business alike. If we're relying on wire coat hangers and string, they say, how can we hope to compete with the burgeoning economies of the east?

Trouble is, it won't change anytime soon. To upgrade our wheezing copper-pipe infrastructure will require digging lots of holes and doling out lots of cash. Are you prepared to pay for it? No? Neither is BT - justifiably concerned about its bottom line. And while Virgin Media is about to extend its cable network, it'll put its cables where it jolly well likes, thank you. (Subject to making a profit.)

(Placing money-making businesses in charge of digital infrastructure is plain dumb. It's like asking a profit-making organisation to run the railways, and no one would be stupid enough to do that, would they?)

Before the internet, there were canals (bear with me). If industry needed faster communication, hills were destroyed, navvies deployed and all manner of expense hung: the fastest pipe between two points would be built, by hook or by crook. Standing in the way of progress was not an option in them days.

For better or worse (better), those days are gone. We're all way too aware of our nimby rights and environmental responsibilities to put up with the cost and disruption. We're just not good at implementing Big Ideas. And even if we did spend years upgrading the telco network to fat fibre-optic cabling, by the time it was done and paid for we'd only need to upgrade again.

A new mobile phone is not, of itself, all that important. But a device that combines the functionality of a netbook with the form factor and connectivity of a phone would be, as they say, 'disruptive'.

Indeed, in a mobile internet world, a MacBook Air/iPhone combo could be the one device to rule them all.